


Problem Town

by belderiver



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII (Video Game 1997)
Genre: Barret Month 2020, Character Study, Gen, HopePunk, Pre-Canon, Resistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26599423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belderiver/pseuds/belderiver
Summary: Truth was, Barret never knew a town without problems.
Relationships: Tifa Lockhart & Barret Wallace
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Problem Town

Truth was, Barret never knew a town without problems. The Corel he’d been born into was long past its heyday. With its chewed-up mountains and encroaching desert, it was already teetering on the brink of ruin before the Shinra Electric Power Company came along to give it a good hard shove. Midgar, with its hard earth and its soft people, didn’t have much in common with Corel. But it had that. It had problems.

Barret had a way with problems.

Not always a way with answers, mind. Those scales fell from his eyes years back, off the same steep drop as his right hand. Great answers seemed less important these days, now that he had so much practice being wrong stowed solidly under his belt, and memories of the consequences collected like silt in the shallows of his heart. No, what mattered most with problems was that you took a good hard crack at them when you spotted them, and the rest… He was still working out the rest.

Today’s problem was an easy one. Hungry mouths, gathered under the rickety tin roof of some new bar in Sector 7, and not enough hands to feed them. Barret wished he had more than the one. It served fine for doling out meals, and for bracing against the shaking shoulders of the newly fed.

“It’s hard times,” he told too many people to count, “and no way out but through. But we’ll _get_ through. We just gotta stand up and change things.”

Some of them stopped shaking after that. Some of them had eyes that flashed to the cold metal where his arm should be. It wasn’t too many that looked back at him after that, and the ones that did, he knew were like him. Problem-solvers. Today he’d only met one, in the lean, wiry form of the bar’s proprietress. A glance at her hands told him she made her fists at least as well as her meals. 

“Do you really believe people like us can change anything?”

He got that question often, from people just like this. The answer stirred up the silt every time:

“Nothing else more worth believing in.”


End file.
